Pearl Jam has no peers. In part, suicide and addiction have cruelly stabbed and slashed at every would-be peer (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots). But also no post-’90s rock band can match Pearl Jam’s deep and creative catalog or commitment to song and stage craft.

The band has somehow, miraculously, built its ethos on Joe Strummer, Michael Stipe and Ian MacKaye and its aesthetics on Pete Townshend, Tony Iommi and Jimi Hendrix.

The artistic and commercial success have afforded the Seattle icons a freedom to do whatever the hell they want and make it work — who else would slow-burn an opening to some 35,000 fans at Fenway Park with an album cut from a mid- career, lesser-known album (“Sometimes” from “No Code”)?

Sunday night at Fenway, Pearl Jam returned to one of their adopted homes. An overly chatty, positively giddy Eddie Vedder was thrilled to back at in Fenway: “So glad we got the job to play this beautiful music box.”

Pearl Jam knows “Ten” remains far and away their most popular LP and included half a dozen songs from the release. But the guys attacked the songs as if they wrote them a week ago, excited to debut the tracks at a tiny, dirty rock club.

Vedder no longer swings from the rigging, living out teenage wasteland fantasies, but his voice still fills lines such as “What the (expletive) is this world running to/You didn’t leave a message/At least I could of learned your voice one last time” with visceral anguish. McCready still rips through solos of equal parts shredder precision and punk rock chaos.

But the boys don’t fear skipping hits, and over 25 years on the road they have created a tradition of turning any number into a fan favorite. The band played 30 songs, the tunes came from nine original albums. The 50-somethings crashed into 2013’s “Mind Your Manners” like the song had as many spins on rock radio as “Jeremy.”

They pulled out a song not played in a decade, “Out of My Mind,” as an encore and dropped in “Singles” soundtrack gem “State of Love and Trust.” Vedder, on his own, turned Fenway “into the church it is” while finger-picking an acoustic guitar through the romantic, celebratory “Just Breathe.”

To the mix they added covers obvious and obscure — two of them, Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” and Little Steven’s “I Am a Patriot” delivered pointed political messages aimed at Washington. Vedder invited Bill Janovitz of local heroes Buffalo Tom on stage to play “Taillights Fade.”

The whole night the group seemed to make it up along the way, seemed to pluck sublime rock, unafraid of real emotion from nowhere, and thrill the stadium. Pearl Jam has no peers.